Last week, Rudy Giuliani made one of the more startling mistakes of the presidential campaign to date. Talking to reporters, on camera, Giuliani said he was at Ground Zero “as often, if not more” than the rescue, recovery, and cleanup workers who spent a year sifting through human remains and rubble. He added, “So in that sense, I’m one of them.”
Insulted workers were deeply offended, causing Giuliani to backpedal, but the damage was already done. At the time, Atrios noted that “Giuliani is making an empirical claim here which could be verified with a little reporting.”
Good idea. To its credit, the NYT follows up today with the truth.
A complete record of Mr. Giuliani’s exposure to the site is not available for the chaotic six days after the attack, when he was a frequent visitor. But an exhaustively detailed account from his mayoral archive, revised after the events to account for last-minute changes on scheduled stops, does exist for the period of Sept. 17 to Dec. 16, 2001. It shows he was there for a total of 29 hours in those three months, often for short periods or to visit locations adjacent to the rubble. In that same period, many rescue and recovery workers put in daily 12-hour shifts. […]
The 29 hours Mr. Giuliani spent at ground zero involved 41 appearances, mostly to give tours to other officials and foreign dignitaries. Many entries include meetings away from the site before the tour. For instance, the schedule included 30 minutes on Nov. 15, 2001, for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, but Mr. Putin’s tour of ground zero was widely reported to have lasted 13 minutes.
Asked to reconcile Giuliani’s transparent lies with reality, the Giuliani campaign issued a bland, boilerplate statement about “steadfast and determined leadership.” In other words, the former mayor’s team couldn’t explain or justify Giuliani’s mendacity, so they hope to avoid the subject. Indeed, the statement didn’t even try to deny that their candidate has been caught lying about his principal presidential qualification.
So, here’s the reality: Giuliani spent about 10 hours a month bringing celebrities and dignitaries to Ground Zero, while rescue workers and cleanup crews put in about 400 hours at the site. In Giuliani’s self-aggrandizing mind, the two are practically identical.
What’s more, Greg Sargent noted today that Giuliani has been lying about this for quite a while.
[W]e thought it would be worthwhile to highlight these Rudy quotes from September of 2006:
“I spent as much time here as anyone… I was here five, six times a day for four months. I kind of thought of it as living here.”
Honestly, this is the kind of gaffe that should effectively end Giuliani’s presidential ambitions. He’s running on an all-9/11, all-the-time platform, and he’s been caught lying about it.
Just think, if only this story dealt with an expensive haircut, it might even be big news to the ridiculous political press.